Much has been made of Madoff’s high-profile losers, but many of his victims were middle-class and working-class people who have been trying to cope after waking up on December 11, 2008, to discover that their financial future was suddenly unclear. The Forward spoke with more than a dozen of these individuals, and the predominant responses were anger and disappointment — not with Madoff, but with the government institutions that were meant to protect investors

The collapse a year ago of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, in which Hadassah had invested $40 million and assumed it had $90 million to withdraw, was actually the second blow to an organization dependent on donations for its survival. The global financial crisis was the first and more significant.

A former executive of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society is about to shake up the world of refugee aid. Longtime refugee advocate, Neil Grungras, founded the Organization for Refuge, Asylum, & Migration last January and it is on the verge of launching a historic global survey about prevailing attitudes toward lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender migrants.